Information distribution is needed in various scenarios to facilitate business operations. Typically, information is gathered from a plurality of sources, such as consumer and product databases, and sent to a number of devices such as computer terminals and personal digital assistants connected to a distribution system. The terms information and data shall be used interchangeably throughout the application. The distribution system, generally, identifies sets or clusters within a chunk of data and distributes the data to individual devices.
As the amount of information available to the distribution system grows, transferring the information in its entirety becomes increasingly burdensome. In addition, making all the information available to every device not only would hinder a user's ability to quickly locate the information that is needed to carry out his or her responsibilities, but also would place unnecessarily high requirements on the storage capacity and connection bandwidth of the receiving device.
A distribution system adapted to distribute only that information which is relevant to each of its consumers is both more efficient and practicable than the ones that transmit everything without discrimination. However, an inevitable side effect of this is that the information needed for each consumer can vary tremendously from one to another, and distribution systems must keep track of the differences. The terms device and consumer shall be used interchangeably throughout the application.
Current distribution systems accommodate targeted information distribution by using consumer attributes. Typically, the consumer attributes are the basic criteria based upon which consumers and the devices used by the consumers are differentiated from each other for information distribution purposes. For example the distribution system may be configured to identify the information to be distributed to a consumer on the basis of a consumer type and a consumer region. The consumer type and the consumer region are the consumer attributes. Based upon organizational requirements, distribution rules are typically created that identify the subset of information to be distributed to the consumers depending on the values of individual consumer attributes and combinations thereof. Using the distribution rules and the values of the consumer attributes for the individual consumers, a profile is then generally generated that tells a distribution system what information should be supplied to the consumer associated with it. When the consumer makes a request for information, the distribution system would read through the user's profile, retrieve the subset of information detailed by the profile, and send the subset of information to the device from which the user made the request.
The information needed by each consumer can be influenced by a range of factors, such as his or her job function, permission level, scope of operation and the like. Various sets of consumers connected to a single distribution system may have information distribution needs based upon different criteria. In addition, frequently changing organizational structures and business strategies constantly cause large scale data realignments.
Current distribution systems are provided with a fixed set of consumer attributes that are used to filter the information. The attributes are not customizable and thus providing ineffective filtering of data leading to the distribution of large amounts of redundant information to consumers and long synchronization sessions.
In addition, the current distribution systems provide no customization possibilities so as to enable individual consumers or applications to configure the consumer characteristics for a particular scenario in their landscape. Thus typically, a distribution system is restricted to distribution of information in a single scenario.
In current distribution systems, each consumer has to be manually created and registered, typically by an administrator. There is no way available in which consumers may be created and registered automatically. In scenarios where the distribution system is responsible for distribution of information to thousands of consumers, it is highly impractical and time consuming to manually create and register each consumer. Consumer information is typically maintained by each organization. The current distribution systems provide no means to automatically create consumers using this already existing information.